Looking at the pricing pages and marketing material for complex SaaS products can be confusing enough, but comparing two similar products is a real pain on paper.

Which do you choose?

From just this information, the list of features, and outdated reviews, it’s impossible to make a decision, especially with a very specific set of requirements.

After checking out the features of the major SEO tools, we decided to try Moz and Ahrefs in parallel, getting trials of both on the comparable Medium and Standard plans.

What are our SEO requirements?

Process Street is a young, content-focused startup. Thanks to our content marketing, we’ve been able to grow the company through PR efforts, blog content and guest posts — all without breaking the bank. Finding a powerful tool to analyze just how successful these efforts have been is top priority, to make it less hit-and-miss and shape our SEO strategy in the future.

Here’s what we need from a tool:

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Human resource departments get a bad rap.

While those in leadership roles predominantly feel that HR has strategic value, a majority of on-the-ground employees feel much differently.

The question is: Why? What can you, as your company’s HR manager, do to correct this?

Here at Process Street, we know a thing or two about HR best practices – and have a wealth of pre-made templates to boot. There’s always room for improvement, though, so lately, we’ve been doing some deep dives into GitLab’s handbook (like my post on how GitLab totally rocks their marketing strategy).

GitLab is unique in a number of ways – most significantly, their willingness to share internal tactics. This post is going to look at five essential concepts every HR manager needs to keep in mind based on GitLab’s own tried and tested processes.

• Why should I care about GitLab?
• Why employees hate HR managers
• 5 human resources best practices for better management
• Successful HR management in the digital landscape

Ready to manage some humans?
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It was known as the email incident. A customer success operations catastrophe that caused an astronomical uproar throughout the office.

Names shall not be mentioned, but before Process Street I worked as a technical service advisor for an environmental testing laboratory. It was our job to deal with customer queries and complaints, to answer questions, and to make sure the service we provided met the customer’s needs.

The email incident: My colleague forwarded a customer complaint email to our manager, adding an inappropriate comment to display his frustrations with that said customer.

Unfortunately, this email ended up in the customer’s inbox too…

Oops!

Mistakes like will happen if you don’t have pre-established customer success operations to act as a form of process control.

Think about it, you’ll have optimized processes for production, sales, marketing, etc. But to effectively scale and grow, you’ll need to build repeatable processes for your customer success department too.

For many companies (72% to be exact, according to data obtained by Forrester), customer success is a top priority. This is because it’s well known that investing in a new customer is 5-25x more expensive than retaining existing ones – as expressed by the Harvard Business Review.

Make customer success operations your top priority by building and optimizing repeatable processes. And in this article, you’ll learn precisely how to do that.

Click on the relevant subheader below to get started. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding customer success.

• Why you need to start thinking about your customer success operations
• How to build effective customer success operations for your business in 4 steps
• Using Process Street to build repeatable customer success operations
• Using performance metrics to guide customer success operations effectiveness

Let’s begin!
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Imagine for a second that you own a global, fast-food chicken restaurant chain.

You know, one that sells Portuguese, peri-peri style chicken. The kind of place that sells lunchtime meals at dinnertime prices. You know the type I mean?

Now think. What’s the worst thing that could happen to your fast-food chicken restaurant chain?

A bout of food poisoning would be pretty bad, or a new KFC opening up right next door would be pretty demoralizing.

But what about running out of chicken? As an internationally recognized chicken restaurant, that would be pretty devastating. Right?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to Nando’s over the New Year holiday period.

We’ll come back to the Nando’s story later, but for now, let’s tuck into this Process Street post on procurement…

In one ‘fowl’ swoop, we will cover the following procurement topics:

• Procurement: What it is (and isn’t)
• Why you need to get procurement right
• How to go about procurement effectively
• Procurement in the modern world
• Digitizing the procurement process with Process Street

Egg-cited to start? Let’s go!

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At Process Street, we’re all about process optimization: creating, implementing, analyzing, mapping, improving, and automating.

There are a lot of layers to processes and it’s easy to get caught up in the complexities.

But really, it’s quite simple.

You need to document your workflow and then follow it, making improvements where necessary over time; continuous improvement.

All of this can be summed up by the concept of process optimization.

In this Process Street article, we’ll give you a quick actionable overview of how to optimize your processes with some tips and tricks of what to look for and how to do it.

We’ll cover:

• Process optimization basics: What you need to get started
• The business process optimization workflow
• How to work out the goals of your process optimization
• How to optimize processes with automation
• Process optimization resources to get started now

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the world completely changed for a period of time. While it’s a time most of us would happily forget, many of the shifts that came about are becoming permanent staples in our society moving forward, particularly with work.

When Covid shut everything down, suddenly those who work in offices found themselves having to adjust to working from home. Some hated it and couldn’t wait to get back to the office, and others loved it, wanting it to become their normal, even post-pandemic. 

While remote work peaked in 2020, working from home and hybrid working are still at much higher rates than they were pre-pandemic, and there’s no sign that will change anytime soon.

This sudden increase in remote work has given us the opportunity to measure how remote work compares to onsite work in terms of environmental impact. In a time where the fate of the planet rests on this generation’s shoulders, we need to find as many ways as possible to reduce CO2 emissions.

However, despite popular belief, is working remotely actually better for the planet than working in an office?

In this article, I will attempt to answer that question. We will cover:

• Environmental impacts of the workplace
• How remote work changes things
• What about a hybrid model?
• So what is the solution?

Business process testing is crucial for operational success.

Why?

All businesses have recurring tasks that have to be accomplished on a regular basis.

This inevitably leads to some sort of written process that helps guide team members on how to accomplish that particular task. As a company grows these processes should get updated, automated, and reviewed for relevancy. The point of this is to ensure that the team is as efficient as possible and that the process is helping as opposed to hindering.

This is where business process testing comes into play.

A study conducted by Łukasz Tartanus of Procesowcy.pl found that 69% of the companies they surveyed had documented and repeatable processes built out. However, only 4% of the 236 participating companies measured and managed them! A GAP analysis isn’t needed to determine a quick win on how to improve efficiency.

• What is business process testing (BPT)?
• Business process testing methodology
• Implementing BPT
• Challenges of business process testing
• Streamline operations with an effective business process testing strategy

What would happen if you were hit by a bus while walking to work?

Well, other than the morbidly obvious, and the time and money spent hiring and onboarding their replacement…

This is the line of thinking behind the infamous “bus factor” – the minimum number of people who, if out of action, would cause your operations to collapse.

“46% of UK businesses would be forced to cease trading immediately if a key person died or was unable to continue working through illness or injury” – Online Money Advisor, Key Man Insurance: A Definitive Guide to Key Person Insurance

It might not be ideal, but it’s a harsh reality that every team has to face; whether temporarily or permanently, your colleagues aren’t always able to make it into work.

We, here at Process Street, have had more than our share of project delays (and even failures) due to a low bus factor, which is why this post has been written. Today, you’ll learn how to identify risky projects by using the bus factor, and how to mitigate those issues as quickly (and cheaply) as possible.

We’ll be covering:

• What is the bus factor?
• How to calculate the bus factor
• Bus factor elements
• How to increase your bus factor
• The limits of boosting bus factor

Let’s get started.
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Gabe Nelson is a content specialist of over 7 years of experience, currently working with bonus.ly. He has a passion and keen understanding when it comes to HR, employee management, and employee rewards. He has written hundreds of content pieces in numerous niches. Currently, he lives in Missouri with his wife and kids.

Your employees are the lifeblood of your business. They provide the support and manpower you need to function and grow. The level of success and the results you achieve will directly reflect the performance of your employees.

Satisfied employees are also more productive and efficient. However, a study showed that as much as 85% of employees are happy with their jobs and only 15% of employees are engaged in the workplace. Happy and engaged workers are more likely to feel personally invested in your business, leading them to work harder and smarter; this results in better products and more satisfied customers.

It’s also vital that employees know where they stand. Not receiving a promotion or a much-anticipated raise because of performance shouldn’t be a surprise to them. Conversely, they should also receive positive feedback for a job well done to keep them moving on the right track; this means that evaluating employees’ performance is an essential role of leadership.

So how do you guarantee an employee’s role is as fulfilling as possible? And how do you communicate how well they are doing in their roles?

In his Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• Evaluating employee performance
• Creating a recognition system that perfectly fits your employees
• Managing and motivating your employees for success

Let’s jump right in!
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If your processes are designed and run properly, you likely shouldn’t have any delays. 

But what if the great processes that you’ve constructed to the nines are still delivering delayed outputs? Did you miss something? Is the process simply not good enough? 

NO. 

If your processes are good, there could be another reason for delays. The answer: Bottlenecks. 

Think of your processes as a sunny day at the beach. You’ve come prepared with sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, snacks, an umbrella, and tons of water. But in the middle of your beach day, you run out of the water screaming with a jellyfish attached to your leg. 

The jellyfish is the bottleneck, and trust me, it stings just as bad for your business when one of those babies wraps itself around your company processes. 

The only difference is you can’t plan for the jellyfish. You can plan for bottlenecks with an effective process management strategy. 

Here’s how: 

• What is a bottleneck? 
• Signs you have a bottleneck
• Types of bottlenecks 
• How to identify bottlenecks in a process
• How software tools can help with bottleneck management 
• Bottleneck management: Prevention is better than cure